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Title: The Mediocracy: French Philosophy Since the Mid-1970s by Dominique Lecourt, Gregory Elliott ISBN: 1-85984-430-8 Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: December, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Strengths and Weaknesses of Lecourt's "The Mediocracy"
Comment: Serious students and professors of French history and culture between 1968-1998 will find this book fascinating. Lecourt, a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VII and a former intimate of Louis Althusser at the celebrated Ecole Normale Superieure (rue d'Ulm), claims that French thought after the publication of the seminal works of Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze suffers a trivialization in theme and scope.

"The Mediocracy" is essentially a polemic written against two currents of French intellectual life: first, the so-called New Philosophers of the 1970's; second, a somewhat later "libertarian" trend in French thought that is embodied by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. This book is interesting not because it is a work of penetrating, original philosophy but because it recreates the intellectual atmosphere of Paris during the thirty years following the "events" of May 1968. Lecourt helps us understand the clashes, tensions, hatreds, and alliances that developed during this time as they appeared in a rich tapestry of sources: books, newspaper articles, TV broadcasts, and university lectures.

Unfortunately, this brief volume is marred in two ways. First, the book combines two essays that have no compelling justification for being published together. The first essay, entitled in English "The Mediocracy," was originally published in 1999 by Flammarion as "Les piètres penseurs," a much more accurate and honest title than the one that appears on the volume under review. The second essay is entitled "Dissidence or Revolution?" and was originally published in 1976 by Maspero. This essay is bland and now obviously dated. Second, the translator has occasional lapses in the admittedly difficult task of transposing French philosophical prose into readable English.

Rating: 4
Summary: A Return to Marx
Comment: Dominique Lecourt, now Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VII, is best known as a collaborator and follower of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and had a few Althussreian-flavored works translated into English in the seventies. The publisher, Verso (imprint of New Left Books) used to issue in translation many such tomes when they were more in vogue, but that has now virtually stopped with the fall of Marxism from academic favor. The appearance of this short book was thus a welcome sight, as so little is being published today that could remotely be construed as Marxist. The sub-title, however, ("French Philosophy Since the Mid-1970's") is slightly misleading. For an anti-humanist in the Althusser and Foucault tradition, Lecourt goes at philosophy in a strikingly "humanist" manner. The first half of the book, "The Mediocracy", is a series of mini-biographical and anecdotal accounts of the main figures on the French philosophical scene in the last thirty years. Lecourt traces the decline in French intellectual life from the militant sixties to the hegemony of neo-liberalism and "free market" ideology. He gets in his licks at the "New Philosophers," the main subjects of his ire, right-wing historians and others. Anyone expecting a dry, analytical account of recent philosophical trends will probably be disappointed, but Lecourt writes well and his vitriolic account is good fun. The second part of the book seems somewhat tacked-on , an essay from the late-seventies entitled "Dissidence or Revolution?" that deals with, and laments, the depoliticization of the intellectuals in the U.S. and abroad. Unfortunately, it has not been updated (e.g.,"the class struggle in the USSR")and reads as if there was still a Marxist USSR. On the whole, however, I enjoyed this, and suspect others drawn to the subject will too. Someone should take Lecourt's lead and do something similar for the U.S. situation, in tracing the decline of American philosophical and intellectual life from the struggles and promise of the sixties to the morass of what passes for intellectual discourse today.

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